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[Music] Of Nature, Man, and God, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] Our first scripture reading of the evening is from the book of Genesis, chapter 1,

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beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered 26. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.'

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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air,

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and over every living creature that moves on the ground.' Then God said, 'I will give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground,

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everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food.' And it was so. And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day." Our second scripture reading is to be found also in the book of Genesis,

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this time reading from the second chapter and beginning at the verse number four. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. "When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprung up.

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The Lord God had not sent rain on the earth, and there was no man to work the ground. But streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.

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Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east in Eden, and there he put the man that he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.

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And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. I would like to begin by sharing with you tonight about Jim and Jack. Jim and Jack were very good friends. They had a long friendship, but it became a special friendship when Jim, who worked on the railroad,

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was involved in a terrible accident which caused him to lose both of his legs. In an attempt to accommodate to his needs, the railroad put him on special duty at a shack in a remote portion of the railroad, where his only responsibility was to control the great lever in a signal tower and to move the great switches of that area from the tower.

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The company built a little trolley that ran from the shack to the tower. And Jim's sole responsibility was to take care of the tower. When he moved to the shack, his friend Jack went with him. Now, at first Jack helped out by doing very simple chores.

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He pumped the water, he took care of the garden, he cleaned the shack. He also pushed Jim in the little trolley to the tower. Jack, you see, had never worked on the railroad. Only Jim had done that. But as time went by, Jack became very familiar with the working of the great levers and the switching of the switches,

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and so he took over that responsibility too, and it was not even necessary for Jim to go to the tower any longer. Occasionally, there was some adjustment of the tracks that had to be done, and for this, a train would have to be stopped and a large key given to the conductor, and he would take it to the appropriate place on the tracks and turn the tracks.

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And Jack learned when to take that key and when to send that signal. And throughout all of the time that he helped Jim, he never made a mistake in that regard, even though he had never been trained as a railroad employee. This went on for weeks and months and years, indeed for nine years.

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And then Jack contracted tuberculosis and, after a very short illness, died. And he was buried very near the shack, outside a tape colony in South Africa. In all of the time, in all of that nine years, when he had kept the garden and cleaned the shack and pumped the water and pushed the trolley and worked the levers and sent the signals and carried the keys,

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Jack never made a single mistake. No train was ever pushed to the wrong side. There were never any near-misses. No switch failed to be switched. It was a marvelous example of unselfish and sacrificial service.

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People still go to the grave to acknowledge that fact, that for all those years, Jack had manned that shack and that tower. No, I made a mistake. Jack did not man these things. Jack ran them, but he did not man them, for Jack was a baboon.

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I want to talk to you tonight about nature, man, and God. I want to talk to you about Jim and Jack and the God who made them both. And I would like to begin by going back to the creation narratives in the book of Genesis. There are, of course, two of them, written by two different men at different times,

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but both under the influence of the same spirit. The first thing that these creation narratives say to us about man and nature and God is this, that God is the creator of all things, that in the drama of creation there was only one actor, and that actor was God.

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We sometimes pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our technological advances, but no man, it seems to me, with any spiritual sensitivity at all, can read the creation narratives in Genesis and not be humbled by the recognition of the fact that it is God who fashions a whole order of creation, and it is God who alone sustains it.

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Reading Genesis should humble man in all of his arrogance, self-sufficiency. Recently, just three weeks ago, I traveled to Florida to visit the new Walt Disney experimental prototype city of tomorrow. They call it Epcot for short. It's an amazing and a wonderful thing to see.

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You enter it by walking under a great sphere that is 11 stories high and which they call Spaceship Earth. In this sphere, the Bell Laboratories present a most entertaining and informative history of communication. Now, gathered all around this sphere are displays by Kodak and Kraft and Exxon and General Motors and one under construction by General Electric.

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And every one of these displays is astonishing, marvelously educational, and at the same time very enjoyable. Yet I must say that I came away from Epcot with some concern. It seemed to me just a little pretentious that man should refer to the Earth as a spaceship, Spaceship Earth. That suggests, doesn't it, that it's of our design and somehow under our control.

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We've always had a tendency to do those things. I remember when the first turboprop planes came out into common use. We called them constellations, though they were not, of course, in any way like Ursa Major or Ursa Minor. We build tall buildings and call them skyscrapers, which they are not.

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We make cars and call them Broncos, and no man ever made a horse. And what is more astonishing than that, we call them Novas. A Nova, a great splendor of heaven, a gem thrown across all of this blackness of eternity, vivid with color, spangled with light, higher and wider and deeper than even Avogadro's number.

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And we call our cars Novas. We even call our bathroom cleanser comets, and we call our snuff Gold River, as if somehow we could really create something. It seems to me that man, in the search of his technological advance, many times loses his humility,

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loses his sense of mystery and gratitude, loses that balance between the gift of God and man using his talents as best as he can. I think the whole thing came back into perspective for me when I was flying back from Florida. Our plane got caught in a thunderstorm, and as we bounced from cloud to cloud,

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and as the coffee cups scattered, and as the stewardesses ran and tried to grab their seats, suddenly everything came into focus. And I remembered what God had said to Job so long ago, "Brace yourself like a man, and I will question you.

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Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand the markings of its dimensions. Surely you know." And if there is any honesty in this at all, we must answer, "Yes, we do know.

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We know that the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof, and it is he that has made it, and not we ourselves." The first great truth of Genesis, then, is that God is the creator of all. The second great truth is this, that everything that God has created is good.

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I was recently reading a book by Sir Alan Walker, who is the director of international evangelism for the Methodist Church, and he tells in this book of something that's recently happened in South Africa. The South Africans were concerned about the hippopotami in their rivers and streams.

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They looked upon them as water hazards, and so they gave instructions that the hippos were to be shot on sight, and this was done. But then problems began to come to the fore. The rivers began to silt up and dam up.

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Fetid pools were created in which malarial mosquitoes could breed. And a certain snail, which had never prospered before, now began to reproduce in great numbers and spread serious disease among the people. It was discovered, you see, that the hippos were nature's dredges in the rivers and streams of South Africa.

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Now this story is to me a parable that represents the fact that all God makes is good. The writer of Proverbs puts it this way in the 16th chapter, "The Lord has made everything for its purpose." And this is an echo of Genesis,

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"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was good." In other words, nothing was to be shot on sight. You know, it's really rather amazing that in the ancient book of Genesis, we see nature being described in terms of goodness,

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because in the ancient world in general, nature was not looked upon as a good thing. Even amongst primitive and aboriginal people today, you find that nature is feared. It strikes terror into those who do not understand it. But led by God and through the pages of Scripture,

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the children of Israel came to understand that nature is very good. I began to count up the references in Scripture to the goodness of nature, but I stopped when I reached 100. From the first book to the last, this truth is emphasized.

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I remember a few years ago when I was recuperating from surgery, I used to like to go out and sit in the backyard. It was early in the spring and the winds were still quite cold. The daffodils were trembling against April.

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And I would sit there and I would enjoy the sun and the breeze and the robins fluffing their breasts and the rabbits coming very close because I was sitting very still, and the starlings strutting by and the ship monks stretching after the long winter sleep.

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All of these things were to me tokens of God. They somehow conveyed to me his presence. He lived in them and I experienced him through them. Of course, they did not contain the fullness of God.

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But as I contemplated these things and enjoyed them, I prayed with St. Francis of Old, "How sweet the understanding that I am no longer alone, but part of an immense life which is generous and resplendent about me."

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Everything that God has made is good. This is the reason that Jesus says to us that not even one of the sparrows he has made falls to the ground without his being aware in careful attention. But Genesis goes on to give us a third lesson.

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It not only says that God is the maker of all things and that all he has made is good, but it also says that all that God has made, nature and man, are to dwell together in harmony with God and with each other. Now, you know, in the Hebrew language there is no word for nature.

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We distinguish between nature and God, but there is no such separation in Hebrew thought. They see all of the created order as one order. And all of the created order is expected to move together in harmony.

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The Garden of Eden is, of course, the symbol of that. Man and nature in perfect, beautiful harmony. That truth is brought out another way. For example, the name that is given to the first man, Ah-Tam,

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is very close to the word for earth, Ah-Tam-Ah. It's a kind of a pun, Ah-Tam out of Ah-Tam-Ah. We might say the human out of the human, showing once again the oneness of man and nature.

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The plants are described as being pleasant to look upon and good to eat. They are for man. But man is also described as being put into the garden to till it and to keep it. He, you see, is the minister to the plants.

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All of the animals are named by man. And in Hebrew thought, anything that you name, you are responsible for. So in the Bible, we do not find a separation between man and nature. They are seen as one order.

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But man does have something unique about him. And that is that he is made in the image of God. Now, we've got to be very sure that we understand what this means. In the ancient world, it was quite common for an emperor or a king

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to place statues or images of himself in the far reaches of his empire. Just so, we are told here in Genesis that God places an image of himself, man, in the midst of the world. And man is to represent God in this place.

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Genesis says that man is to have dominion over all of the creation. But this dominion does not give man, of course, the right to abuse nature. No, there are many places in Scripture where man is given specific instructions about the care of nature.

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For example, in Exodus 23, one of the reasons for the fourth commandment is given in order to rest the barnyard animals. In Leviticus 25, man is told to let the land lie fallow in order that the earth might be rested.

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In Deuteronomy chapter 20, you read of how when man is engaged in warfare and besieging a city, he may attack the men of the city, but he may not hurt the trees of the city. For trees, the Bible says, are not to be treated as men.

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They are not to be attacked. In other words, when man is given dominion over nature, when he is put into the driver's seat, he is not free to drive wherever he wants to or however he wants to.

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He must still abide by God's rules for the road. This whole concept of man's dominion is not a major emphasis in Scripture. It only appears in two places. It appears in Genesis, and it appears in Psalm 8.

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But there are many other passages which represent to us not man's dominion over nature, but man's oneness with nature. For example, in Psalm 144, we read, "What is man? He is but a breath passing like a shadow."

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Or in Psalm 49, we read, "Man cannot abide in pomp. He instead perishes like the beast." Or the one which I find is my own personal favorite, in Psalm 104, there is a list of all of the parts of the creation that praise God.

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The sky, the stars, the moon, the sun, horses, eagles, badgers, they're all listed as praising God. And in the midst of this long list, in no particular place of promise, just at verse 23, it says,

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"And man goes forth to his work and to his labor until the evening." He is simply listed with all the rest of creation. And at the end of the psalm comes the word, "These all look to thee." The great emphasis in Scripture, you see, is not on man's dominion over nature,

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but rather man's oneness with nature. And I think that very much needs to be emphasized in our time, because many people have developed a kind of hierarchical idea of man, that he somehow is of a different order than nature.

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Hierarchical theologies are to me very dangerous. They're dangerous in the first place because they compartmentalize man and nature. They separate man and nature. They reduce nature to only the stage on which man lives out his life,

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or only the scenery against which man lives out his history. Another peril in hierarchical theology is that it leads to the exploitation of nature. When we emphasize the dominance of man, we find people going out and destroying our forests, and polluting our waters, and torturing our animals, and fouling our air,

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and justifying their activities on the ground, that they have dominion over all things. We're becoming alert to these problems now. But sad to say, we are alert to them only because of what is happening to man as a result of them, not because of the terrible things that have been visited upon nature.

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[bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side. Another reason why I deplore hierarchical theology is that hierarchical thinking has led to some of the cruelest episodes of history.

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It's hierarchical thinking that led men for years to see themselves as superior to women. It's hierarchical thinking which for many years led whites to think themselves superior to blacks, and to look upon blacks as an inferior level of being. It's hierarchical thinking which is the root of every expression of prejudice.

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Whenever you give to some people the idea that they are of a higher level, they will take to themselves authority and power, and invariably, the weak and the defenseless suffer. So I echo scripture, and I stand against that kind of hierarchical theology, and I invite you to stand with me. It's rather like this.

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Suppose that we went out and bought a car, and we decided among ourselves that we would just run that car until it fell apart. That seemed to us to be the most economic and efficient use of the car that we could get. Now, no one could really find fault with that,

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because we bought the car, and we could do with that car whatever we wished. But we couldn't do the same thing to a horse, or to a hen, or to a forest, or to a lake, because we as men cannot make forests, and horses, and hens, and lakes. We are talking here about something which God has made and which he calls good.

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This question of man's relationship to nature is not just a social question, or a scientific question, or an economic question. It's a moral question. It's a metaphysical issue. And every society has recognized man's oneness with nature until our own. It's a sad thing to contemplate that no period in history has ever despoiled nature as has our own.

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You can look back through the writings of the sages and the wise men of all nations and creeds, and you will find them extolling the unity of man and nature, and telling stories sometimes true, sometimes legendary, but happy stories and good stories about the union of the two.

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But now in our own time, interestingly enough, in a time when many people look on other people as being nothing more than naked apes, in our own time, we are doing things to nature which are unspeakable. Just the other day I was looking at some pictures,

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pictures of dogs in laboratories having their hindquarters crushed in what are called "blake-clock presses." This is supposed to demonstrate how fast fluids collect in crushed tissues. Pictures of baboons on which open-heart surgery was being performed without benefit of anesthesia. Pictures of rabbits in cosmetic company laboratories,

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row after row of little rabbits locked in stock so that they could not move their heads, and foul substances are put into their eyes, and they are observed as their eyes alterate and they lose their sight. The experts tell us that these same tests could be run through cell or tissue cultures,

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or through methods of testing not developed because these animals are so readily at hand. And many suggest that these tests are, at the best, most often invalid. But you see, they're cheap, and they're fast, and they enable us to get to the marketplace what we want to get there.

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But there can be no justification for this. There's no room for this kind of thing under any view of man in the image of God. And any theology which encourages this kind of thing is reprehensible and to be repudiated. Any attack upon nature, any deliberate fouling of our waters,

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any polluting of our airs, any raping of our woods, any despoiling of our earth, is wickedness. It is to take what God made good and to defile it. Have you heard about Washu? Washu's a chimpanzee out of the University of Oklahoma.

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She began her climb to fame not in Oklahoma but in Nevada. They were trying to discover how much a chimpanzee could learn in sign language. And in a matter of just four years, Washu learned 140 different signs from the language of the deaf. But it was not known whether Washu could really conceptualize what she was saying.

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Perhaps it was simply imitation, monkey see, monkey do. So it was decided to take her to the University of Oklahoma, where under a Dr. Fouts, more research could be conducted. There were three goals.

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To understand the extent of Washu's vocabulary, to expand that vocabulary, and then also to discover what other forms of verbal and nonverbal communication could be entered into with this chimpanzee. Within a very short time, it was discovered that Washu could conceptualize, that Washu could express her own thoughts through the symbols and the signs that were taught to her.

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It's very interesting to observe that Washu is now teaching other chimpanzees to communicate through sign language. So there Washu sits in her sterile cage, carefully cared for, kept very comfortable, and protected from anything that might do her harm. But what interests me the most about Washu is the message she sends most frequently.

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What makes me think about Washu is the signs she signs more than any other sign. What does she say to her keeper? She says, "Let me out!" Dominion does not include that kind of thing. You see, God's wish for his creation is harmony.

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And this harmony is to be directed by man his image until all of creation is redeemed. You ask a lot of people about redemption. Did Christ die on the cross just for man or for all of creation? For nature and animals too. Or they'll say for man alone, but they're quite wrong. The scriptures say again and again that the whole creation was redeemed by Christ.

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That's what makes me very uncomfortable about this talk about the fall. We talk about the fall of man, which is rather hierarchical in its orientation. It suggests that he was at this level and he tumbled to this level. Sin is not so much a fall as it is a rupturing of relationships.

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A breakdown of the relationship between God and man, between man and other men, between man and the world of nature. And redemption means the healing of all relationships. The reconciliation of all that God has made to everything else that God has made.

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That's the reason the Bible speaks so often when it speaks of redemption, of the new creation. We read in the prophets, "You shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace. And the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing. And all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."

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We see in Jesus in the gospel, the new Adam. Notice his relationship with nature, how he talks about the lilies and the sparrows, how his parables are about sowers and seeds and weeds, how even the wind and the sea obey him. We read in the epistles of Paul when he writes to the Romans, he says,

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"In Christ the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay." Or he writes to the Colossians, "In him all things hold together. God through him reconciled all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven." And then those great eschatological pictures in the Bible,

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which do not speak of a disembodied man meeting a disembodied God, but rather paint rich pictures of the redemption of the whole creation, words like these, "The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead them, and they shall not hurt or destroy in all of my holy mountains.

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And the earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea." This is God's redemptive dream, you see, that all that he has made should be a neighborhood again. You know, it's sad what we've done to that word "neighbor." We think of neighbor just as that person who is nigh, the person who is closest.

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Yet the biblical picture of neighbor has nothing to do with our spatial or ideological or temporal vicinities. Jesus' parable of a good Samaritan should rid us of those ideas. The neighbor is anyone. We build tall chimneys so that our poison smoke will not pollute us.

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Where does the acid rain fall? It falls on the Canadians, and they are our neighbors. We want to gorge ourselves with fast foods, mostly hamburgers. And to make cheap hamburgers, you have to have cheap beef.

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So they burn down great stretches of tropical forests in Central America in order to make pasture land. And as they burn them down, they chase away tribes that are confused and lose everything and live in poverty and malnutrition. They don't even know our names, but they're our neighbors. Or we use up our resources so greedily.

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We take so much from the earth with no concern for the future. No idea, no echo of the Hebrew concept of intergenerational immortality. No concept of the Christian communion of the saints at all. We use it all and forget about our children and our children's children.

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But they too are our neighbors. The concept of neighbor goes beyond geography, and it goes beyond our time, to all people alive now and all those who will be alive tomorrow. It is of them that we should be thinking. Of all this created world that God has made.

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The man who was, of course, of all Christians most in love with nature was St. Francis of Assisi. And I've always loved that beautiful legend concerning him. He was walking through the Apennines, and he was near a town named Cubillo. And the townspeople were chasing a starving wolf out of the town.

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And the ravenous creature came toward St. Francis, the animal almost dropping from hunger. And St. Francis approached it according to the story, and instead of attacking it, caressed it. And the animal was at peace. And then, to make the story even more miraculous, the people of the village came running out,

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not with hatchets and knives, but with bread and porridge to feed the wolf. And there was a great peace. It seems to me that in St. Francis nonviolence with the world of nature is our model. You see, the first great right of all things is to be left in peace, to go without violence.

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That applies not only to people, but to all of the created order. And that says to us, it seems to me, that we must stop polluting our water, that we must stop poisoning our air, that we must stop despoiling our woodlands, that we must stop profaning our earth.

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The judgment against us is already present. One out of every four of us is dying of cancer. And that means that we must stop, we must reject the counsel of those who for their own selfish profit attack the created order. I think we need to spend more time like St. Francis looking at the stars,

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and more time watching May beetles crawl on May blossoms, and more time contemplating glowworms as they glow over August wheat fields. People who do those things who should be ruling. Oh, I know you smile at that.

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But I'm sick to death of the so-called wisdom of the world. What I'm interested in is people who have the wisdom of God. People like Chief Seattle of a Northwest Indian tribe who wrote to the president, whom he addressed as the great chief in Washington, these words a hundred years ago.

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"How, great chief," he said, "can you buy or sell land or sky? Do you own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the waters? The earth is sacred. The shiny pine needle, the sandy shore, the mist in the dark woods are holy to all people.

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The flowers are our sisters. The deer, the horses, and the eagles, they are our brothers. The juices of the meadows and the body heat of the colt and man are all of one family. So learn to respect the land. Tell your children that the earth is rich.

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Teach them that whatever befalls the earth will also befall the children of the earth. Teach them that when they spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. For this we know, that all things are connected like the blood which unites one family. This we know, that man did not weave the web of life.

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He is merely a strand in it, so that whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Chief Seattle never read the Bible, but he echoed it. Indeed, he echoed the words of God himself when he said, "This is the sign of the covenant which I make between me and you,

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and every living creature that is with you, and with all future generations. I set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and all the earth." Let us pray. Our Father, this is your world, and we rest in that thought.

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Thou hast made us in thine own image. Teach us then to love the world as you have loved it, to be a blessing to the world as you have blessed it. May we represent thee truly in our love for all that you in great grace have made.

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And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you, and give to you and to all those whom you love,

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and to all those whom nobody loves, his peace.